The Reincarnationist

Chapter 15

While Josh waited, he lifted the camera to his eye and looked through the viewfinder. As he snapped shots of the woods bordering the site to the right and the landscape off to the left, the sound of the shutter reverberated in his ears, like an old friend’s greeting.

Right now he preferred the world framed in this oblong box, all peripheral excess and activities cut out. Reframing the image, Josh went for an even wider shot and saw a break in the line of trees that suggested an opening into the forest.

As if he were standing there, not sitting in the car, he could smell the pine sap-fresh and sharp-and feel the green-blue shadowed space undulating around him. No. He didn’t want to leave this present, not now.

Struggling, Josh brought himself back, to the car, to the metal camera case in his hands. To the smell of the stale cigarette smoke.

Rome and its environs were triggering more episodes than he’d ever had before in one time period. What was happening?

He knew what Malachai would say. Josh was experiencing past-life regressions. But despite these multiple memory lurches, Josh remained skeptical. It made more sense that reincarnation was a panacea, a comforting concept that explained the existential dilemma of why we’re on earth and why bad things can happen-even to good people. It was easier to believe reincarnation was a soothing myth than it was to accept the mystical belief that some essential part of a living being-the soul or the spirit-survives death to be reborn in a new body. To literally be made flesh again and return to earth in order to fulfill its karma. To do this time what you had failed to do the last.

And yet how else to explain the memory lurches?

Josh had read that even past-life experiences that seemed spontaneous were precipitated or triggered by encountering a person, a situation, a sensory experience such as a particular smell or sound or taste that had some connection to a previous incarnation.

He hadn’t seen a single movie in the past five months, but he’d devoured more than fifty books on this single subject.

Something the Dalai Lama-who had been chosen as a child from dozens of other children because it was believed he was the incarnation of a previous Dalai Lama-had written in one of those books had stuck in Josh’s mind.

It was a simple explanation for a complex concept, one of the few things he’d read that made Josh feel that if what was happening was related to reincarnation, then perhaps it wasn’t a curse, but an enviable gift.

Reincarnation, the Dalai Lama explained, was not exclusively an ancient Egyptian, Hindu or a Buddhist concept, but an enriching one intrinsically intertwined in the fabric of the history of human origin-proof, he wrote, of the mind stream’s capacity to retain knowledge of physical and mental activities. A fact tied to the law of cause and effect.

A meaningful answer to complicated questions.

Something was happening to him, here in Rome. Time was twisting in on itself in amazing detail, and the pull to give in and explore it was stronger than it had ever been. Josh put the camera down. He stared out at the break in the tree line. He could keep fighting the memory lurches or he could open his mind and see where they took him. Maybe he would come out on the other side of this labyrinth understanding why he’d had to travel its path.